


polaris

by stiction



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Magic, Meteorstuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-09
Updated: 2015-03-09
Packaged: 2018-03-17 02:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3511598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes you feel something inside you calling out to something out in space, the tendrils of stars that lay out into forever like the tracks of a nomadic caravan beckoning to you as old friends. You don’t trust them, but a part of you needs them, these pinpricks of fire in the endless dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	polaris

**Author's Note:**

> A relic from 2011, the time of the ambiguous meteor crew members and melodrama. 
> 
> Featuring Rose's blindness as a product of ascending to God Tier, as well as fudged rainbow drinker biology and aspect abilities.

When you were little you were terrified of the night. You hid inside or, if it came suddenly, under the wing of your lusus, her warm side a comfort while you trembled in fitful jolts. She worried about you; it wasn’t healthy to be so attached to the day. You worried about you as well, your sickliness and what it might mean for you to live in the day - now sometimes you think that’s what turned you into such a meddler.

You grew out of it, though, the fear at least, as one outgrows the clothes of their wrigglerhood. You lost your shaking with your grub legs, and with your pupation you shed the fear itself, and though you still preferred the light of day, darkness was no hardship. If you felt uneasy you could join your lusus in the yard, reading or working on something you could fit in your lap. Sometimes you read aloud, and she curled around you like a barricade between your words and the night, your own fragile existence as a bubble in the sky.

But there is no light here. It is the darkness of total absence. You and the seven others - well, six and a half, really - are hurtling forward in space inside a tomb. And space. Well. Space is huge and cold and dark and you know nothing else now.

You are a mess of orange and red endoskeleton wrapped up in glowing dermis and a fashionable dress.

Sometimes you feel something inside you calling out to something out there, the tendrils of stars that lay out into forever like the tracks of a nomadic caravan beckoning to you as old friends. You don’t trust them, but a part of you needs them, these pinpricks of fire in the endless dark.

There is no hope here, either, though you suppose that would be your fault.

He did kill you, after all, so you also suppose you can’t very well be blamed for it.

(A secret: Nobody blames you for it.)

The seven and a half of you are hurtling forward in space, waiting to crash right through some mystical barrier into a new world.

Sometimes you wonder if this new world is just a myth.

* * *

As far as you know, Sollux is not dead.

But Sollux is also not alive.

Sollux is not definitively _anything_.

And Sollux is lying on what the humans call a “bed” (you had wondered what these strange flat things in some of the respiteblocks were, if not some odd sort of relaxation-purposed furniture), his face streaked with deep yellow blood.

(A secret: You never liked fabrics in mustard.)

It’s not because nobody bothered to clean him up; you have done it personally, several times. But whenever you leave and come back there are fresh trails down his cheeks, spots on the pillow. Part of you wants to believe he’s crying, but when you touch his face your fingers come away coated in thick, cold blood.

Your digestive sac churns and well you’d like to believe that that’s revulsion but you know the feeling all too well and that is hunger pure and simple. Countless times you have stood there staring at the blood and contemplating the indignities that sticking your digits in your mouth and sucking on them would summon. Countless times, too, you have concluded that the satisfaction of drinking would far outweigh the embarrassment of licking your hands clean in a darkened room next to a blind, half-dead comrade.

Every time you decide it best to take up the towel again and rub at your skin until it is raw and pulsing with light. Your insides ache, but it’s nothing like the way your blood pusher does.

And while, as far as you know, Sollux is not _dead_ , Sollux is also _not alive_.

Sollux is hanging in limbo.

You are all hanging in limbo.

* * *

Sometimes you go outside.

You should die there but you don’t. Space is an old friend, is inside you, is calling you, is controlling you, is beckoning for you to join it, yes indeed.

Tonight the pull is strong, and you are weak to temptation. The human gods are slumbering by now, though you know they rarely sleep a whole night through. None of you can even tell when night ends and day begins anymore. The Knight and the Maid keep time and nobody bothers questioning it.

You climb the several sets of stairs, carefully skirting the indents from all the times Tavros took a spill. Some place deep in your core mourns the fact that there will never be new ones, but the voice is weak and distant and detached. The ladder is barely a burden now, your muscles grown strong in your death and rebirth. In no time you are there again, higher even than the day the human gods arrived. You are leaving the sphere of safety afforded to the lot of you, and the cold will wrap around you like a cloak.

They are not your gods and nobody worships them as such, but you are all still quietly in awe - revulsion - fascination.

They are not your gods.

(Another secret: You wish she was your god. You want the light, you want her light, her human heat and inhuman heat and her scathing touch.)

You open the hatch to your secret spot and slither out onto the ledge, bending in ways that used to be painful so that you can fit through the opening.

Space parts to welcome you.

An old friend.

For a while you sit and watch the stars stream by in bands, your speed too great to count them all or even glimpse their individuality. You grow cold but it is something you acknowledge, not something you feel. It is indefinable and though it begins to make even your limbs prickle, you relish the feeling.

You are lulled into staring by the stars and the night and the cold and the dark and when you come back to your senses you are well and truly freezing and it hurts, by the gods proper it hurts.

You can hardly move, but you manage to squeeze back into the ship, locking the hatch with clumsy, blunt fingers. You’re not sure if you’re shivering but if you are then it explains the way your vision is shaking and your steps are uneven.

Your dress is likely ruined at this point; the melting ice will destroy the delicate fabric. A pity. It was one of your favorites.

You’ll make another one if you ever regain use of your fingers.

By the time you reach ground level, you are almost steady enough to pass for normal. You skirt the others, clustered around their computers, and duck into the hall with the transportalizers. Your respiteblock will hopefully have enough water for a soak in the ablution trap, and although the water is never warm, anything is warm compared to you at the moment.

You take a moment to rest once you reach the circle of transportalizer pads. Your entire body is shaking, aching. It’s hard to concentrate. If you had running blood it would be frozen.

“That was unwise.”

You remind yourself quietly that she is not your god, and then attempt to turn around. Your feet slip, icy soles of your slippers tractionless on the slick metal ground, and Rose catches your wrist.

It burns.

It burns and you scream and nothing but a low, pitiful groan comes out.

Her skin is hot like it will blister yours; she lets go, as close as Rose has yet come to shock, and you clutch your wrist to your chest, half-terrified to look. The skin feels raw, but when you check underneath your hands there is nothing but flawless glow, the frost gone. It tingles with painful intensity, and it takes you a moment to place the unfamiliar feeling: warmth. Her touch has made you warm there.

“My apologies.”

You had almost forgotten she was here.

Your mouth opens and nothing comes out, your words departed from yourself.

“No,” you manage, “I - I was just departing to my respiteblock for the remainder of the evening. I’m not... not feeling very well, exactly.”

It’s exceedingly disconcerting to talk to someone when you cannot see their eyes. The Knight is difficult enough to converse with, but you can at least see the vague outline of features behind his glasses. You stare at her lips instead, which tighten into a thin line.

“I didn’t ask you along just to have you subjecting yourself to subzero temperatures for hours on end,” she states. Her feet touch the floor - you hadn’t realized she was hovering. For once she is grounded and you marvel detachedly at the fact that she is shorter than you. Her steps are slow and rhythmic, circling you. Your protein chute is raw, like you’ve swallowed something that’s gotten stuck halfway.

Rose slides to a halt in front of you.

“We need you living,” she says. You are suddenly amazed by the fact that a person can glare so intensely through a layer of plush, fluorescent hood.

Swallowing around the inexplicable bump in your protein chute, you clear your throat. “If you haven’t noticed, Rose - I’m already dead.”

Her hands wrap around your wrists, clenching tight, and your teeth snap together in a hiss of something straddling agony and ecstatic relief. Heat courses down through your skin, a thin veil of steam fogging the air between you. The grip loosens, Rose’s fingertips sliding up into your palms, tracing the lengths of all your fingers at once. Your digits are flooded with her energy and you slump forward, panting.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Her fingers lace into yours, the soles of her feet departing once again from the floor. She hovers backwards, leading you by the hands to the transportalizer pad that leads to your respiteblock. With a small tap she touches down, and you follow, clinging to her fingers with a desperation that is nigh embarrassing.

Light flashes, the familiar uncomfortable sensation of being destroyed and rebuilt in the blink of an eye, and the two of you are in your respiteblock. You are now acutely aware of the spare furnishings. A bed, in which you have spent many a sleepless, squirming night entrenched in the horrors of your diurnal delusions. A table in the corner that is nearly invisible for all the fabric dumped upon it.

“Do you have a bathtub in here?.”

You want to protest, want to cling to that’s left of the impressionable distance between the two of you. You’ve clung so long to the vague possibility of Rose that you’re afraid of what will happen if it becomes real.

But you haven’t had the wherewithal to stop shaking in hours.

You nod towards the doorway and she guides you there, still holding on to your fingers. It’s cramped in the small room with the two of you and the trembling in your limbs in fierce.

She lifts her arms and you flinch, expecting more steam heat, but she only drops her cowl back.

The lump in your throat is back, throbbing this time with everything you’d probably better not say.

“It’s okay to stare,” Rose says, nice enough and with the corners of her mouth tilted up.

Her eyes are pearly white, completely glazed over with a shine like well-maintained incisors. You’ve never seen her face up close but you’re certain this wasn’t the case when you observed her over Trollian. She has white eyelashes, white eyebrows stark against her dark skin.

“Can you…”

“Yes,” she nods, blinking slowly. “Don’t ask me to count how many fingers you hold up, though.”

“I won’t.”

It was probably sarcastic--your serious response is met with another quirk of her lips.  

“Hold out your hands again, please.”

You obey, you’re not sure there’s any way you couldn’t, still staring at the milky shine of her eyes until she closes them. Her eyelashes flutter softly. You can see her eyes move behind her eyelids, and now the minute flicker of something behind her white-blonde hair.

“Rose,” you start.

She doesn’t open her eyes, just strokes her thumb over the knuckles of your left hand so that your knees go weak.

“Take off your clothes.”

The shudder runs straight from horn tip to toe and Rose holds fast to your hands to steady you.

“I won’t look,” she says, and you’re pretty sure it’s a wholly inappropriate time for her to be winking.

She slips past you to start running the water in the ablution trap. You’re left to stand and shiver and slowly strip your slushy clothing over your arms. A sleeve tears off under your fingers, rips the torso clean in two so that you have to peel it from your skin in swaths. Your breath is hitching now, pain prickling in your arms and legs as feeling returns to your body.

“Breathe in.”

You can feel her palms a twitch away from your back; as soon as you take a breath she presses her hands flat to your skin.

Fire cuts straight through the outer layer of ice, water streaming down your shoulders. It turns to steam where Rose touches you, an audible hiss that you can barely hear under the involuntary whimpers in your throat.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers behind you, soft and constant so that you aren’t even certain she’s speaking at all. “I’m sorry.”

She takes her hands away, and the fire dies out, but the terrible prickling under your skin has spread from between your shoulderblades down past the base of your spine, wrapped around the sides of your ribcage. There’s a puddle around your aching feet.

“Can you get into the tub?” Rose asks, and when you don’t answer she puts her hands on your shoulders and nudges you in the right direction.

For a moment you’re afraid you can’t lift your feet, but they go up, and the water is so warm compared to you. There are tears pouring down your face. Rose presses at your shoulders until you sit down, slide under the water until only your head is dry.

“You need to be submerged.” It isn’t a question.

She’s leaning over you, floating so that her knees barely skim the edge of the ablution trap. Her hands cover your eyes.

Rose pushes you under the water.

You panic at the heat in your think pan, throbbing just beneath the hard edge of bone. It echoes up through your horns, so brittle and dead from the cold and now flaring up again with the proximity of Rose’s fingers, the lukewarm lap of water on the edges of the tub.

It radiates from the heels of her hands, pulsing down through your neck and shoulders and the air in your lungs empties up past Rose’s wrists. Bubbling away, until you’re empty.

She holds you under, her hands moving to your shoulders so that you can see her through the water, blurry and shining. Her white eyes are locked tight onto yours when she finally lets you up again. Your skin feels--normal. Still tingling, especially in your fingers and toes, but no more ice, no more fire.

“How’s that?” she says, and you notice now how open her face is, concern conflicting with the near smug slant of her voice. You take one look at her eyes and know in your thawed heart that you’re doomed.

 **  
** You kiss her straight on the lips, so warm and full. It would kill you if you were still alive.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Sigma Octantis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7614538) by [Twilit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilit/pseuds/Twilit)




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